Teacher Diaries: ZAP!

Have you guys ever played the ZAP game? I'm guessing no?

If you have, I apologize because this is going to be boring for you to read. You should probably just send it to five of your friends to read instead.

ZAP is a great game that middle schoolers play to be mean and embarrass one another. Here's how it works: I grab your hand and begin to write on the palm of it. I do this because I have romantic feelings for you that I can't quite understand. But I don't want you to know this, so I act as though the only reason I am touching your hand is to write on it and play ZAP.

On your palm, I write the name of a person we both know. On the back of your hand, I write a time. If your look at the name on your palm before the time written on the back -- you have to ask that person out! OMG forever!

Of course, I will not write the name of anyone desirable on your hand. I could not risk the idea of your actually asking them out and meaning it! What about my vague and confusing feelings for you? What about those????

No no, it would be much better to write the name of someone weird on your hand so that you will look at me and we can laugh and laugh and look into each others eyes and I can feel those feelings some more.

And as for that "weird" person I have chosen, they get to be laughed at and potentially even fake asked-out for our entertainment. Isn't that so funny? Being thirteen is so cool! We will all look back on these days and feel proud of our behavior!

Clearly I do not have a future in hand modeling.

So clearly this is not something that I, the real adult me, support. I do, however, marvel at the tireless and timeless efforts of middle schoolers to make each other feel badly. Why is that? When I was in middle school, my very best friends and I would play a game called "Salt in the Wound." Sounds really fun, right? Well it wasn't. We would sit in a circle, and one-by-one tell each other things we didn't like about each other. One time someone actually brought a bag of salt.

"Salt in the Wound" always ended with one girl crying in the hallway and another girl comforting her saying "Well I didn't say anything about you . . ." and then those two would slowly strengthen their alliance until they were strong enough to bring down someone else with some major wound-saltening. And then the cycle would repeat itself.

This is what we did for fun.

So in conclusion, be glad that most of us have successfully blocked out our middle school years. And even though they are atrocious human beings, be nice to middle schoolers because they are definitely not nice to each other. We must show them the way.

I am a preacher.